Dumb Ass Question About Copyright

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OK - you are at home with your stereo, you have a tuner ( radio receiver ) you hear a track you like and so you record it. What is the difference between that and downloading a track from the net ?

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JPaul, I understood the implied question here to be "What is the big difference to the RIAA?"

Obviously, in the narrow terms of copyright infringement there is no difference.
The difference ( to the RIAA) is what comes next.
That file is not only in your possession illegally, but is also available (from you) to the entire internet.

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Originally posted by velcrom@28 June 2003 - 13:07
OK - you are at home with your stereo, you have a tuner ( radio receiver ) you hear a track you like and so you record it. What is the difference between that and downloading a track from the net ?

Both ways you end up with a music track for your own use that you didn't necessarily buy.

I am obviously missing the point somewhere :blink:

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or for that matter, everytime you watch mtv or vh-1 and you record the video for your own personal use, how is that any different? Are they going to start suing people for watching these music channels. NOT.


I guess I'm missing the point here too as well. :rolleyes:

The Difference is its a bit quicker 2 record a song that d/l it lol.

sorry, double post! :P

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Originally posted by 3RA1N1AC+28 June 2003 - 08:35--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (3RA1N1AC &#064; 28 June 2003 - 08:35)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>internet radio is still flying a bit too low under the radar to get into any trouble yet for not paying royalties to record labels, but it will prolly become a serious dispute eventually.[/b]

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Internet radio has been attacked so cruely by RIAA as to almost obliterate their existance. They&#39;ve been slapped with back-taxes (paid to RIAA rather than the US government) even going back years&#33; Some sites had to close down or pay immediate &#036;100+K to continue operating and roughly that amount more yearly to continue operating.

The few that remain got bought out by guess who... members of RIAA&#33;

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Originally posted by velcrom@28 June 2003 - 08:47
Yes but radio stations are broadcasting to the public

If I invite you round to my house and play you a track I have recorded from the radio neither of us is breaking the law - even if you record it as well, or I give you a copy I have made

but I don&#39;t see the RIAA going after people who own stereo systems&nbsp; :blink:&nbsp; &#33;&#33;

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Apparently you haven&#39;t been following their attempts to put phone-home devices in almost all new stereo equipment and their attempts to block first digital recording in newer models and now they&#39;re even seeking to do what they can to block the &#39;analog hole&#39;&#33; This they admit openly, as little things like certain rights and freedoms for individuals is getting in the way of their corporate profits.

Know what DAT (Digital Audio Tape) is? RIAA butchered it down to the virtual unknown that it is today.<!--QuoteBegin-3RA1N1AC@28 June 2003 - 08:20
this is true.&nbsp; the entertainment industry HATED the fact that people had recordable cassette decks and VCRs, but as years passed it became not as big of a deal.&nbsp; they&#39;re upset about mp3s and mpeg/divx piracy now because the quality is better.&nbsp; and back in the age of cassettes there was the quality degradation factor-- if one person copied a tape for someone, and that next person made a copy for someone else, and so on... the quality of the nth generation cassette would be utter crap.

but with digital file trading there IS no nth generation copy.&nbsp; every copy is the same as the original file, so every file is a 1st generation copy.[/quote]Actually, with Kazaa, there IS possible file corruptions with every copy over the internet. So the &#39;tape&#39; degredation issue has a VERY REAL equivalent for Kazaa&#33;

Other networks have file verification systems built-in and partial file sharing (even hashing the PARTS to ensure every 1-10% of the file is correct) -- although they tend to lack users, they blow Kazaa away in this regard&#33;

RIAA&#39;s tea needs to go back into the harbor... because it&#39;s barely fit to drink anyhow, the tax is exhorbitant, and you have to give up many of your unalienatable rights to drink it &#39;legally&#39;&#33;

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Originally posted by velcrom@28 June 2003 - 14:07
OK - you are at home with your stereo, you have a tuner ( radio receiver ) you hear a track you like and so you record it. What is the difference between that and downloading a track from the net ?

Both ways you end up with a music track for your own use that you didn&#39;t necessarily buy.

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The only difference is in the broadcasting / uploading. The broadcasting of a song is permitted as they generally have permission to do so. Uploading on the other hand, which could be available to millions, is considered dirtribution, which is illegal by most standards if it is copyright material which you do not have permission to distribute. Though the final possesion of the material is the same, and if I am not mistaken could also be considered illegal, though they are not going to chase down tapers, copiers or the like. They WILL chase down uploaders / distributers. There is no difference to them between an uploader and someone selling CDR copies at the swap meet, in theory to them, it causes them the same loss of revenue, to bad eh, f**k &#39;em.

The difference is very simple,

It is virtually impossible to detect someone copying from the radio, or television, or tape to tape etc. So they couldn&#39;t do anything about it.

However they can do something about sharing on the internet, as it is possible to trace the supplier(s) and the recipient(s).

As a somewhat ironic diversion, ever bought a blank audio / video tape from sony. What do they think we feckin do with them. Make copies of wedding videos.

Well as far as I understand they actually get money every time you buy a blamk CDR from Sony, irregardless of what you use it for, just more people the&#39;ve managed to piss off.

They&#39;re days are numbered, boycott the purchase of any music they distribute and it may come more rapidly. It is our duty not to buy shit from them, as they have made this a battle to the end.

Seems like someone else has also thought about this-
Some reasons

ed quillen
So what if the recording industry dies?
By Ed Quillen


The recording industry in this country claims to be hurting, and so it plans lawsuits against people who share music files on their computers.

The financial pain looks real. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, CD sales declined 7 percent in the first six months of this year, compared to the first half of 2002.

What caused this? The RIAA says that people aren&#39;t buying as many discs these days because they&#39;re finding the music they want on file-sharing services like Kazaa and Grokster. The songs are free, and people can get just the song they want, instead of paying &#036;16.95 for a disc with the song they want and a dozen lame tracks.

However, that can&#39;t account for all of the decline. Consider my experience with the finest rock &#39;n&#39; roll album ever made, "Exile on Main Street" by the Rolling Stones. I bought it on vinyl in 1972, on cassette tape in 1988 and on CD in 1997.

This continued purchasing of the same music is worthwhile in that it helps keep Keith Richards alive so that he serves as a continuing rebuke to the "zero tolerance" mob. But there&#39;s a limit; once I&#39;ve got the music on CD, that&#39;s as good as it gets.

Since CD technology appeared in 1981, the industry hasn&#39;t contrived a superior medium. As for the "digitally re-mastered" re-releases and the like which continue to emerge, I&#39;m 52 and my hearing is such that I wouldn&#39;t be able to appreciate the difference, no matter how refined the source.

Multiply me and my discs by millions of other graying baby boomers who used to buy lots of CDs to upgrade their collections, and you&#39;ve got an explanation for the music industry&#39;s sales curve. For years, the industry could make tons of money just selling us stuff we&#39;d already bought at least once before. The industry could do this without investing in new talent or finding new audiences or developing new technology.

Now we baby boomers have pretty well completed the replacement of other media with CDs. The RIAA responds by blaming the sales decline on file-sharing; a few years ago, the industry went after the first big service, Napster.

I hadn&#39;t paid much attention to Napster until I read about the litigation and how the service faced imminent closure. Under those circumstances I naturally had to try it.

But the songs I downloaded weren&#39;t ones I&#39;d have purchased; if I&#39;d wanted to buy them, I&#39;d have already gone to a local shop.

Based on that experience, and on what friends tell me about their own music downloading, I suspect this attitude is fairly widespread. In that case, the RIAA&#39;s claim of losing billions of dollars in potential sales to free downloads is specious - those are sales that never would have happened, with or without free downloads.

By using this dubious claim of economic loss, the RIAA initially went to court with the idea of getting a judge to rule that file-sharing technology was itself illegal. But in April, a federal judge in Los Angeles sensibly ruled that peer-to-peer file-sharing was in itself perfectly legal.

Thus thwarted in that effort to control our personal computers, the RIAA announced last week that it&#39;s taking a new tack - searching for songs in the file-sharing services open to the public, issuing subpoenas to Internet service providers to get customer records, then suing the file-sharers for copyright infringement.

On the legislative front, the entertainment industry in 2001 got one of its lackeys, Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., to propose a law that would have mandated copy-protection hardware in every computer. That came after the Digital Millenium Copyright Protection Act, which made it illegal even to talk about how copy-protection technology works - a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Now another lackey, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said on June 17 that he&#39;d like to see technology that would destroy computers that shared copyrighted material. "If that&#39;s the only way to do it," he said, "then I&#39;m all for destroying their machines."

And if I lose a year of work on my Great American Novel because of a bug in the Hatch program, where do I turn for relief?

Let&#39;s take the RIAA at its word that the industry might die on account of new technology. And so what? It was born of a new technology (Thomas Edison&#39;s phonograph), and if new technology kills it, note that we have survived the loss of other worthy old technologies, from steam locomotives to manual typewriters.

Musicians would have to play music to earn their keep, and fans would find ways to keep the music flowing. Lackey senators would have to find a new source of campaign contributions, but they&#39;d manage. Meanwhile, we could go back to using our computers without any help from Big Brother.

Ed Quillen of Salida ([email protected]) ) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.




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